Featured Artist/Maker: Susie Olczak

Susie Olczak’s work and research explores how we perceive and experience geometric form and light as we move through our urban spaces. Her work has been shown around the Uk, in Japan and Finland in galleries and the public realm. She has shown at the BBC in Scotland, Cambridge Institute of Astronomy and for Charles Saatchi at the Big Chill Festival.

Temple 2015, glass, aluminium & neon, 150 x 100 x 40 cm

This sculpture was inspired by T.S Eliot’s The Four Quartets and Eliot’s references to light, time and consciousness. Susie combined architectural materials to create a geometric form that is fragile, minimal and yet has presence within the space it inhabits. The work crosses between three dimensional and flat planes as you move around it, offering a sense of illusion. Some of the construction looks permanent and fixed in position and other parts of the structure suggests that the elements that made up the piece have been dropped into place and slotted together. This was inspired by Japanese construction techniques such as is the Kiyomizu-dera Temple in Kyoto and the Mathematical bridge in Cambridge.

The work offers the suggestion that it might be taken apart and reconfigured and is a continuation of Susie’s ‘flat pack’ sculptural forms that are based around the idea of being able to construct forms to alter a space in a temporary way and forms that can have multiple configurations. The piece is influenced by Gestalt Pyschology- our eye and brain’s ability to complete shapes and to make up the whole. The last triangle is made up by the reflection of neon in glass and our eye is able to complete two triangles from a certain vantage point where the piece becomes a focal point.